Why Community Should Report to the COO: Driving GTM Alignment and Business Results

It’s time to rethink where your community team reports—here’s why the COO is the best fit.

Community has evolved dramatically over the past decade. What was once a small, tactical function has transformed into a strategic driver of growth, customer loyalty, and innovation. Today, whether you’re in SaaS, Web3, or any other industry, community plays an integral role in shaping product development, driving retention, and enhancing brand visibility. It has the potential to empower GTM teams and support long-term business goals.

But despite its increasing importance, community teams often sit in departments where they’re underutilized or misaligned with broader business objectives.

When community teams report to Marketing, they often become overly focused on brand awareness and advocacy, leaving little room for deeper, more meaningful customer engagement or leveraging valuable community insights. When community is placed under Support, the focus shifts to ticket deflection, sidelining opportunities for advocacy, product feedback, and long-term relationship building. Similarly, when community is housed under Product, its role becomes primarily about gathering feedback, often at the expense of the broader strategic benefits of customer engagement. This pattern repeats across departments, with each one steering community efforts toward their own specific goals—ultimately limiting its broader potential and impact across the organization.

This siloed structure prevents community from becoming a cross-functional growth driver, capable of aligning and driving impact across sales, marketing, customer success, support, and product teams.

Community is inherently a horizontal function—it spans multiple departments and objectives. So why place it in a single silo when it can have a greater impact on your company’s overall success? That’s where the Chief Operating Officer (COO) or the Head of Business comes in. These roles are responsible for aligning cross-functional teams toward common business goals. The COO’s broad, strategic oversight is the perfect place for community teams to drive long-term value across the entire go-to-market engine. This makes them the perfect leader for overseeing community efforts and unlocking their full potential.

But first, some historical context.

For years, community teams were typically tied to specific departments that were seen as the natural home for community:

• Marketing: Community was often viewed as an extension of marketing efforts, focused on brand awareness and lead generation. It made sense in the early days—community-driven content helped fuel marketing campaigns, and the primary goal was to attract new users.

• Customer Success: Often seen as a way to help customers onboard en masse via low-touch or self-service methods, community at some organizations is referred to as “Scaled Success” - clearly showing where its priorities are (and aren’t).

• Support: Support has been the historical starting point for many communities, and as such often relegated community to deflecting customer service inquiries or reducing ticket volume. This limited the strategic impact of community, reducing it to a tool for short-term operational efficiency rather than long-term growth.

• Product: Community has sometimes been placed under Product because the team provided direct feedback from users that could influence future product development. But in this structure, community’s potential to drive broader business outcomes was often limited.

These structures were born out of necessity when community was still in its early stages of development. As the community function grew and matured, keeping community limited to these silos began to create friction—increased complexity and misalignment with organizational goals.

The community box:
If it can happen to me, it can happen to you

Real talk: this happens all the time, and I’ve seen firsthand the impact of community being siloed into one department (and the missed opportunities that arise from it). During my time at Evernote, I worked for a time under a Marketing leader who only cared about brand awareness and engagement—important, but only a fraction of what community can drive.

The leader literally told me, “I don’t care about the goals of other teams when I have my own problems to solve.” Even though other teams like Product, Customer Success, and Sales were eager to tap into community-driven insights and initiatives, I was told to prioritize Marketing’s goals, with no room for collaboration across departments.

This tunnel vision led to missed opportunities to use community as a driver of customer retention, product innovation, and sales enablement. The focus was too narrow, and community’s broader potential was never realized. 

Eventually, other leaders saw the need for a more integrated approach, but valuable time had already been wasted. Instead of focusing on long-term, cross-functional growth, community was left spinning our wheels within one department and not achieving the impact that we might have had.

This experience reinforced why community belongs under a leader who prioritizes cross-functional alignment—not one focused only on their department’s immediate needs. Community can’t thrive when it’s limited by one department’s narrow view.

The COO’s role: Cross-functional alignment

The role of the COO is to ensure alignment across all functions—marketing, sales, support, product, customer success, and more. The COO has the strategic oversight to drive cross-functional collaboration, making them the ideal leader to oversee a community team that interacts with all of these departments.

The COO is responsible for aligning operations across functions to achieve company-wide business goals. This broad scope is critical for community teams, as community touches every corner of the organization—sales, product, marketing, and customer success—in a way that requires a holistic, strategic approach.

Community’s horizontal nature requires a horizontal leader

Community isn’t a one-team function—it’s a cross-functional driver. Marketing benefits from brand advocacy, Salesleverages referrals and trust-building, Product gains real-time user feedback, and Customer Success deepens relationships to improve retention.

But too often, companies try to force community into one department’s framework, and that’s where things start to break down. When community is placed under a single team—say, Marketing—it becomes too focused on short-term acquisition goals. If it’s under Support, it’s seen primarily as a ticket deflection tool, limiting its potential to contribute to retention, product feedback, or revenue growth.

I recently advised a well-known AI company with an incredibly engaged customer base—exactly the kind of company that could build a powerful, multi-functional community spanning the entire customer journey. But instead of positioning community as a strategic asset, they buried it several levels deep under a sub-function within Marketing. Because of that structure, every community initiative had to ladder up to narrow marketing KPIs rather than fueling Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Product in meaningful ways.

In another example, a well-recognized SaaS company comes to mind. Their community sits under growth marketing, which—by nature—is highly transactional and focused on short-term acquisition. Growth marketing is great for driving user signups, but it’s rarely designed to foster relationships, increase retention, or build long-term advocacy—all of which are core to community’s impact. When community is trapped within a team focused only on short-term metrics, its broader value gets stunted before it even has a chance to grow.

This is why community needs to sit under a leader who thinks horizontally. The COO (or equivalent Head of Business) has the visibility and strategic oversight to ensure community serves the entire GTM motion—not just one department’s goals. Under the COO, community becomes what it’s meant to be: a cross-functional growth engine that fuels marketing, sales, product, and customer success—without getting stuck in one team’s blind spot.

Breaking down silos and enhancing collaboration

When community reports to a single department, it’s often too narrowly focused on that department’s goals. One of the biggest challenges with community teams reporting to a single department is that their efforts are often biased by the priorities of that department.

• Marketing might see community purely as a tool for brand awareness or sourcing customer stories, sidelining its potential for customer retention or growth.

• Sales might think of community only for its lead-generation potential. 

• Customer Success may view community’s role as primarily customer education and account growth. 

• Support might focus solely on ticket deflection, ignoring the long-term relationship-building and advocacy potential of community.

• Product might prioritize feedback loops, without considering how community can drive sales or improve customer experience.

By reporting to the COO, community teams gain the strategic oversight and alignment they need to drive impact across all departments and team-based biases are minimized. This holistic approach ensures that community teams are focused on business-wide outcomes rather than the isolated goals of a single function.

When community is empowered to work across departments—marketing, sales, customer success, support, and product—it can more effectively drive customer engagement, loyalty, advocacy, and product innovation.

Hey, who moved my community?

Community teams have long been placed under Marketing, Product, or Support—not because those are the best homes for them, but because that’s just how it’s always been done. But just because something has history doesn’t mean it has strategy.

The reality is, community doesn’t stay in one lane. As it grows, it touches Marketing, Sales, Product, Customer Success, and Support—yet instead of being given clear ownership, it’s often shuffled around from team to team, like a hot potato no one quite knows what to do with.

And here’s what I’ve seen happen over and over: When a department gets a new leader, if that leader doesn’t already understand the value of community, the community builder is forced to start from scratch—educating, justifying, and fighting for resources. If the new leader doesn’t buy in, they often move community elsewhere, disrupting the work already in progress and forcing yet another realignment to match the goals of its new department.

This churn is exhausting, inefficient, and ultimately prevents community from delivering its full impact. And the cycle repeats—because department heads change far more frequently than COOs, meaning community is constantly at risk of being misaligned, deprioritized, or outright abandoned.

That’s where the COO comes in. Instead of being confined to one department’s immediate needs, community can serve as a strategic function that fuels the entire GTM motion—protected from the whims of individual departmental changes. But I get it—this isn’t the way most companies have operated. So you might be wondering:

“Community belongs in Marketing—why mess with that?”

Community doesn’t always start in Marketing—sometimes it begins in Support, Product, or even Customer Success. The problem is, no matter where community starts, it often doesn’t stay in the right place. As it grows, the function becomes more cross-functional and impacts multiple teams—sales, product, and customer success, just to name a few.

The challenge arises when community teams get passed around between departments, like a hot potato. Each team might see its value, but with no clear cross-functional ownership, the broader potential of community remains untapped.

When community reports to the COO, it’s no longer stuck in silos. It can serve the entire organization—aligning with the goals of Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success—without getting lost in one department's specific objectives.

“COOs already have enough on their plate; won’t this get deprioritized?”

Yes, COOs juggle a lot, but that’s exactly why they’re perfectly positioned to oversee community efforts. Their role is about coordinating across departments, ensuring all functions work toward shared business goals. By integrating community into the COO’s responsibilities, you eliminate silos, streamline decision-making, and make sure community is aligned with the whole business—not just one department’s immediate needs.

Community isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s central to the GTMs (go-to-market) that drive growth and revenue. A COO knows how to leverage this function as a strategic asset across all teams, ensuring it has the resources and focus it needs to succeed.

“Won’t community get lost under the COO?”

Actually, the opposite happens. Under the COO, community is prioritized because they understand its strategic value across the business. The COO ensures that community isn’t siloed or treated as an afterthought. Instead, it becomes a core driver of long-term growth, contributing to everything from sales enablement to product feedback and customer retention.

With the COO at the helm, community isn’t confined to one department’s narrow focus; it becomes an integrated force that drives alignment and measurable impact across the company.

Where does your community belong?

As the role of community continues to evolve, it’s crucial to ask yourself: Is your community team in the right place?

Where community sits within an organization speaks volumes about how it’s valued—and how much potential it has to influence long-term business growth. Whether it’s housed in Marketing, Support, Product, or even Operations, it’s worth stepping back and considering if that placement is still the right fit as your company scales.

The placement of community within an organization directly impacts its effectiveness. If your community team is trapped in a single department, ask yourself:

• Is community being used to its full potential, or is it limited by one team’s goals? 

• Is it influencing multiple departments, or is it stuck serving only one function? 

• Is leadership enabling cross-functional collaboration, or is community struggling to gain traction?

If you’re not sure, it might be time to start thinking about how cross-functional alignment could unlock even more value from your community. As more companies shift towards placing community under the COO (or equivalent role), the conversation isn’t about whether it should happen—it’s about how soon you can start making the change.

So, take a moment. Reflect on your community’s current home within the organization. Does it have the strategic oversight and support it needs to thrive? Or is it time for a change that could help your business get the full value of your community efforts?